These garbage-sorting robots are just as accurate as human workers and up to twice as fast
https://
nbcnews.to/2JV9uZE

via @NBCNewsMACH
6:45 PM - Apr 17, 2018

Horowitz said the Cortex system, now in use at three U.S. recycling plants, can pay for itself in three years or less — similar to the return on investment cited by ZenRobotics and Bulk Handling Systems.

"This has really been an awakening of the industry," said Steve Miller, CEO of Bulk Handling Systems, which makes a garbage-sorting robot called MAX-AI. The spidery-armed bot, which uses a suction cup as a grabber, has been deployed at three sites in the U.S. and three in Europe, with more of the bots on order.

This is an important development. These robots are able to perform complex sorting tasks that until recently had to be done by humans. This will find applications in other labor intensive jobs.

“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Now researchers in Singapore say they have trained one to perform another task known to confound humans: figuring out how to assemble furniture from Ikea.

A team from Nanyang Technological University programmed a robot to create and execute a plan to piece together most of Ikea’s $25 solid-pine Stefan chair on its own, calling on a medley of human skills to do so. The researchers explained their work in a study published on Wednesday in the journal Science Robotics.

“If you think about it, it requires perception, it requires you to plan a motion, it requires control between the robot and the environment, it requires transporting an object with two arms simultaneously,” said Dr. Quang-Cuong Pham, an assistant professor of engineering at the university and one of the paper’s authors. “Because this task requires so many interesting skills for robots, we felt that it could be a good project to push our capabilities to the limit.”

Then, over more than 11 minutes, the robot devised a plan that would allow it to quickly assemble the chair without its arms knocking into each other or into the various parts.

“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Horowitz said the Cortex system, now in use at three U.S. recycling plants, can pay for itself in three years or less — similar to the return on investment cited by ZenRobotics and Bulk Handling Systems.

"This has really been an awakening of the industry," said Steve Miller, CEO of Bulk Handling Systems, which makes a garbage-sorting robot called MAX-AI. The spidery-armed bot, which uses a suction cup as a grabber, has been deployed at three sites in the U.S. and three in Europe, with more of the bots on order.

This is an important development. These robots are able to perform complex sorting tasks that until recently had to be done by humans. This will find applications in other labor intensive jobs.

A video clip from three years ago shows how a company has developed a sorter for choice scrap metal. From aluminium they want as pure as possible window frames to recast as window frames. For this case the aluminium ought to be pure without any aluminium alloys. The scrap metal is shreddered to a certain max size, then sent thrue a filter to remove unwanted particles and small stuff. The rest is put losely unto a conveyor belt that takes them thru a xray machine. The computer identifies the alloy of each single piece. Further down the conveyor a high pressure air hose puffs the unwanted particles for use in other applications and the pure aluminium remains as result. A recycling task not even humans can do.

Say goodbye to your bank teller and your insurance sales agent. Dozens of financial services jobs like these are starting to be replaced by technology. Over the next 15 years, AI will take even more of these types of jobs, according to research firm Autonomous’s new report.

“We are on the verge of software gaining competency to perform service work,” says Lex Sokolin, global director of fintech strategy for Autonomous. “The key thing that AI cannot do yet is context switching, which implies that a chess robot cannot drive a car, and a chatbot cannot see.”

In financial services, AI’s impact on jobs is likely to be particularly dire for certain categories of employees. Sokolin projects that by 2030, AI implementation could save U.S.-based financial services companies $1 trillion through productivity gains and reduced head count.

Banking and lending could see the largest change, he says, with 1.2 million jobs at risk and a potential $450 billion in savings. Insurance follows, with 865,000 jobs at risk and a projected $400 billion in savings. Lastly, there are 460,000 jobs at risk in the investment management sector, equivalent to as much as $200 billion in savings.

Such shifts will not happen overnight. In Sokolin’s view, AI will drive gradual change over the next seven years, and then accelerated change between 2025 and 2030.

Get ready for the little person living inside your phone and speaker to sound a lot more life-like. Google believes it has reached a new milestone in the quest to make computer-generated speech indistinguishable from human speech with Tacotron 2, a system that trains neural networks to generate eerily natural-sounding speech from text, and they have the samples to prove it.

In a research paper published earlier this month, though yet to be peer-reviewed, Google asserts that previous approaches to text-to-speech (TTS) systems have thus far failed to achieve a genuinely natural sound. Techniques such as concatenative synthesis, in which pre-recorded samples of speech are stitched together, and statistical parametric speech synthesis, Google says have been insufficient, explaining, "The audio produced by these systems often sounds muffled and unnatural compared to human speech."

With Tacotron 2 (which is not the same as the world-ending super-weapon used by Lord Business), the company says it has incorporated ideas from its previous TTS systems, WaveNet and the first Tacotron, to reach a new level of fidelity. The full description of the new system is highly technical and nigh impossible for a layperson to parse. In a post at the Google Research Blog, software engineers Jonathan Shen and Ruoming Pang explain:

In a nutshell, it works like this: We use a sequence-to-sequence model optimized for TTS to map a sequence of letters to a sequence of features that encode the audio. These features, an 80-dimensional audio spectrogram with frames computed every 12.5 milliseconds, capture not only pronunciation of words, but also various subtleties of human speech, including volume, speed and intonation. Finally these features are converted to a 24 kHz waveform using a WaveNet-like architecture.

There are audio samples at the link. It really does sound like a human is speaking. Going to put a lot of voice actors out of work.

“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Tesla is having trouble producing its mass market EV Model 3. One of the reasons turned out to be the FluffBot. This robot was charged with putting a fiberglass fluff mat on the battery pack. This required good vision and the ability to interpret images. The poor robot was often befuddled by this task. The robot was fired, and because the fluff seems to have done nothing useful, no human was hired as a replacement.

My guess is that humans will keep some manual labor jobs but more because of their complex senses than because of t heir brains.

“Atlas’ control system coordinates motions of the arms, torso and legs to achieve whole-body mobile manipulation, greatly expanding its reach and workspace,” the company says of the two-legged robot. “Atlas’ ability to balance while performing tasks allows it to work in a large volume while occupying only a small footprint.

How long before all the various fast developing AI, sensor and robot movement technologies are brought together in a human replacement robot worker?

“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

Some days the robot future feels closer than others. At the annual Google developer jamboree in California last week, the tech giant wowed the audience with the language skills of its virtual assistant software, now so fluent it can make calls without the recipient realising the voice does not belong to a human.

It’s a long way from Silicon Valley to Swansea, where less than a fortnight ago nearly 800 call centre workers were blindsided by Virgin Media’s surprise decision to pull out of Wales’s second-largest city in 2019. While Virgin did not blame the march of technology for the decision to close its Swansea base, the move is symptomatic of dramatic changes sweeping the UK customer services industry.

Carolyn Harris, the Labour MP for Swansea East, said that the loss of a prominent employer was a blow to the local economy that, over the years, has become reliant on call-centre jobs.

“I am absolutely devastated for my city,” said Harris. “There are people who have built their lives and employment with the company.”

Change sometimes isn't easy but at least they can see it coming.

“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

BostonDynamics wrote:Parkour Atlas
Published on 11 Oct 2018
Atlas does parkour. The control software uses the whole body including legs, arms and torso, to marshal the energy and strength for jumping over the log and leaping up the steps without breaking its pace. (Step height 40 cm.) Atlas uses computer vision to locate itself with respect to visible markers on the approach to hit the terrain accurately.

I showed some of my coworkers these Boston Dynamics videos on Friday. They were duly impressed.

I recently started working for a company that runs the largest (under one roof) testing labs in the world. I did the programming for receiving samples. The line is completely automated aside from when the samples arrive a human opens the box and dumps the tubes into the container at the front of the line, presses the button, the door to the BIM closes and the tubes are picked up by a big wheel that looks something like a water wheel.

I love the challenge of the work I do, but I hate the idea that people are losing jobs to automation. We are gearing up for transfer of all lab testing to the new lab and at a meeting the other day it was announced that not a single person who works in the receiving department will be losing their jobs. They will all be trained for other jobs and are being given choices about which jobs they can move into, provided they complete the training of course. But the training will be done during regular business hours and they will continue to be paid for coming and training in new areas. I think that is great.

"I know that human being and fish can coexist peacefully"
--- George W Bush

I showed some of my coworkers these Boston Dynamics videos on Friday. They were duly impressed.

I recently started working for a company that runs the largest (under one roof) testing labs in the world. I did the programming for receiving samples. The line is completely automated aside from when the samples arrive a human opens the box and dumps the tubes into the container at the front of the line, presses the button, the door to the BIM closes and the tubes are picked up by a big wheel that looks something like a water wheel.

I love the challenge of the work I do, but I hate the idea that people are losing jobs to automation. We are gearing up for transfer of all lab testing to the new lab and at a meeting the other day it was announced that not a single person who works in the receiving department will be losing their jobs. They will all be trained for other jobs and are being given choices about which jobs they can move into, provided they complete the training of course. But the training will be done during regular business hours and they will continue to be paid for coming and training in new areas. I think that is great.

You are very lucky.

I recall mass layoffs of bookkeepers after a new computer system was installed in the accounting department of the company I worked for about 20 years ago.

“If everyone fought for their own convictions there would be no war.”
― Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace